Looking At Year One

As I approach my first year of online poker play I thought I would comment on what I have observed and what I have hopefully learned.

First, expect to lose money for the first few weeks or longer. Even if you are a knowledgeable casino player, online play will take a time to adjust to and during that time you won’t be playing your best game. If you are starting out in poker then learning the basics is going to cost you. You’ll play hands you shouldn’t play and you’ll continue to play hands after you should have folded them. The learning process in poker can be brutal and expensive. This is especially true if you learn everything at the table. If you can learn from books or by reading online forums you will probably save yourself some money. Just having a list of starting hands and an understanding of why some starting hands work better in some situations will probably save you a lot of cash.

Be honest with yourself about your play. It does you no good to think you are a winning player if you are really a break even or losing player. This brings me to a very important point. You must track your play in some fashion. Tracking your play can range from knowing how much you have deposited to your account and what your current account balance is to detailed notes on every session you have played and money you have won or lost on a daily basis. Use of programs like Poker Tracker can be a great aid in this.

Learn how to fold. Winning poker players fold far more hands than they play and they fold them at all stages of play. Chasing without proper odds loses you money. It seems easy for us to find reasons to play a hand but we have to train ourselves to find reasons to fold a hand and give greater weight to folding than playing. If you are a new player and are playing more than 20% of your hands in NLHE then you are probably a losing player.

Play for real money if you can. There are things that you can learn in play money but they are limited to more or less the mechanics of the game, actual play is too distorted by the fact that there is nothing on the line.

Learn bankroll management or at least how to make your money last a long time. Until you become a winning player no bankroll is big enough to keep you from going broke. But you can learn how to get 10,000 hands of experience from a $50 deposit instead of just 100 hands and as a beginner the more hands you see more opportunity you have to learn. Penny tables and $1 tournaments are ways to see lots of hands for little money and begin to develop a feel for the game

Play one table at a time and just play poker, not play and watch TV etc., so that you have time to observe the play when you aren’t involved in a hand. This will allow you to learn to read other players and ‘put them on a hand’. You’ll also get a feel for the table dynamics so that you’ll know that you can limp in with marginal hands early and expect to see the flop or fold those hands because they can’t stand up to the expected raise. You can also learn the outcomes different styles of play tend to lead to. Watch that maniac’s, who’s catching cards, stack rise and fall until they finally bust out of a tourney, or see how often they go out early if they don’t catch lucky. See how the rock lasted until close to the bubble then got eaten by the rising blinds. Or, how about that player you thought of as being passive but is now raising a lot pre-flop and has almost doubled his stack without ever seeing a flop. In poker, you can often learn more when you are not playing in a hand than when you are.

These thoughts were intended for new players but probably will be beneficial for anyone who isn’t already a winning player.